Focused Energy raises whopping $240M Series A for laser-powered fusion tech

Focused Energy recently raised an oversubscribed $240 million Series A round, one of the largest early-stage rounds for a fusion power startup. 

The new round, announced last week, brings the company’s total private capital raised to $300 million, the company told TechCrunch. The startup has also received $200 million in grants, collectively making it one of the most heavily funded fusion startups.

Germany-based focused-energy.co/">Focused Energy is developing a reactor that will use lasers to compress fusion fuel, an approach known as inertial confinement. The lasers fire on a fuel target, which compresses under the onslaught to create conditions ripe for fusion. When atoms inside the fuel finally fuse, they release significant amounts of energy.

The company is basing its design on the experiment at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. That experiment is so far the first and only one to create a controlled nuclear fusion reaction that released more energy than it took to ignite it. The NIF connection is more than conceptual — Debbie Callahan, who helped design the fuel target at the NIF, joined Focused Energy in December as its chief strategy officer. 

At Focused Energy, Callahan is working to simplify the fuel target. The NIF’s target is complex and hard to manufacture, and the facility only fires about 400 shots per year. Focused Energy, on the other hand, will need to do 10 shots per second, or about 864,000 shots per day. 

One simplification involves doing away with the hohlraum, a precision-manufactured gold cylinder that converts laser energy into X-rays. The X-rays do the work of compressing the fuel pellet at the NIF. Focused Energy’s laser system is what industry insiders call “direct drive” — that is, the lasers directly compress the fuel pellet. That should help boost the reactor’s efficiency, making it easier to produce power. 

Focused Energy is hoping to build its first demonstration system, Lighthouse, at the site of a decommissioned nuclear fission power plant in Germany that was operated by the utility RWE. 

RWE was the main investor in the Series A, Focused Energy told TechCrunch. The round also included participation from the German Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation (SPRIND), Prime Movers Lab, and the European Innovation Council Fund.

As large as this Series A is, the fusion industry has been an investor favorite this year. Last week, Thea Energy raised $100 million to develop its pixel-inspired fusion reactor. In February, Inertia Enterprises raised a $450 million Series A to develop its own reactor, which could be a close competitor to Focused Energy’s. And in January, Type One Energy told TechCrunch that it had raised almost $90 million toward a $250 million Series B.